Project Detail

Clean Energy for Coastal Communities: Solar Electricity for Youths Capacity Building in Selected Coastal Communities in the Bonthe District

The project titled "Clean Energy for Coastal Communities: Solar Electricity for Youths Capacity Building in Selected Coastal Communities in the Bonthe District" shall provide solar electricity for the primary school, students and youths in Mania community, in the Settieh Chiefdom, community members in the Bohol Community on the Turners Peninsula in the Nongoba Bullum Chiefdom in Bonthe District and pilot mobile charging Kiosks that will be managed by selected disadvantaged youths within the Bonthe District. The communities are coastal communities with high number of population of unemployed youths whose only hope of surviving is fishing. Due to the easy access to fishing grounds and fishing practices, the majority of children neither complete primary schools. The few that endeavor to continue are constrained with limited facilities all throughout their primary school education in these communities. Some of the limitations faced by the students include access to sustainable energy for lighting home at night for studying and the schools lack computers and printers for doing administrative tasks. Due to the high rate of dropouts, the youth population is always on the increase within the coastal communities mainly for fishing. With the current trend of mobile technology, almost all the youths have mobile phones that they regularly pay to those who have generators for charging their batteries for communication and efficient transactions of businesses and money transfers. Generator all over the world emits carbon dioxide that contribute to climate change, therefore the use of solar electricity to replace generators is considered a smart way of eliminating the emission of CO2 gas into the atmosphere.
This project hopes to help the youths in Mania to complete the construction of community center and utilize it as a solar charging centre for the whole community. The project will introduce mobile charging Kiosks that will be managed by disabled and disadvantaged youths within selected communities in the Bonthe District.
The specific objectives include:
1. Securing solar panels, batteries, charge controllers, cables, switches, lamps, printers and desktop computers
2. Completing the Youth Center in Mania and constructing phone charging Kiosk in Bohol
3. Designing and Piloting Mobile Charging Kiosks for the disabled/disadvantaged youths within selected coastal communities in the Bonthe District.
4. Installing solar electricity within the Mania School and youth community center, and Bohol community
5. Training two teachers in basic computer operations
6. Distributing solar lamps to students
7. Establishing phone-charging stations in Mania and Bohol Communities.

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Project Snapshot

Grantee:

Reptile and Amphibian Programme Sierra Leone

Country:

Sierra Leone

Area Of Work:

CapDev
Climate Change Mitigation

Operational Phase:

OP6 - Y5 (Jul 19-Jun 20)

Grant Amount:

US$ 25,000.00

Co-Financing Cash:

US$ 450.00

Co-Financing in-Kind:

US$ 2,000.00

Project Number:

SLE/SGP/OP6/Y5/CORE/YCC/03/12/2019/63

Start Date:

12/2019

End Date:

11/2020

Status:

Satisfactorily Completed

Project Characteristics and Results

Notable Community Participation

? RAP-SL had discussions with the Mania community members during its community needs assessment. The Bohol community been immediate to Mania was considered based on the fact that youths from there always sail to mania in order to charge their phones and DVDs when there is no generator. The project will ensure that locals are engaged in every aspect of the project implementation. They will be encouraged to undertake the activities that will promote the speeding up the implementation of the project within their communities

Significant Participation of Indigenous Peoples

Bonthe District largely comprise the Sherbro and Mendes but due to the fact that coastal communities nowadays are inhabited by many tribes in Sierra Leone, in order to ensure the involvement of locals settled within the communities in meetings, someone from the communities will be engaged to translate to creole, which is a common medium of communication in Sierra Leone. For other project activities, the contribution of locals will be sought through in-kind assistances including fetching water for the construction work, cooking and transportation of materials for the work etc

Gender Focus

In order to ensure gender and disability mainstreaming, the project will involve women, school children and the disabled/disadvantaged in meetings, workshops and on-the-ground project activities. The men will help in the transportation of materials from the wharfs to the stores, construction of the structures and the installation of the solar items while women will help fetch water, prepare food for work and help also in the transportation of project materials. For the static charging stations, two youths including a man and a woman will monitor the incomes per schedule in order to ensure that moneys raised from the charging facilities are well accounted for. It is believed that the project will benefit both men and women through the provision of solar electricity, computers and printer in their community school, solar lamps to their children and phone charging facility within their communities at affordable price. The disadvantaged within selected communities will provided a mobile charging facility as an income generation means. In the education and sensitization meetings and workshops, the involvement of women will be of priority. The project coordinator will ensure that for every meeting, the ratio of men to women is at least 60:40 and in every deliberation, women will be given priority.

Policy Impact

It will help popularize the existing environmental policies on sustainable and clean energy that will create bigger impact especially towards the forestry policy that caters for the protection of Protected Areas (PAs) and also the Wildlife Act of Sierra Leone. The awareness-raising component of the project will raise the awareness of locals about climate change, global warming, forestry and wildlife conservation policies in Sierra Leone. This will surely contributed to the enforcement of existing laws about biodiversity conservation and also hopefully initiate the idea of instituting bylaws for the protection of coastal mangroves and wildlife species within the district.

Inovative Financial Mechanisms

RAP-SL believes that locals usually have wealth of knowledge about their immediate surroundings that could be of importance to scientific or technological interventions; therefore, it will organize knowledge sharing events and tap into the knowledge base, make the best use of them and improve upon those that require refinery for the improvement of their understanding of the scientific /technological knowledge. Some members of the communities will be selected as project steering committee members that will support the project implementation. They will be trained in various project cycle management to ensure that the knowledge remains in the community when RAP-SL?s intervention ends. Field staff will be encouraged to always listen to what locals have to say after sharing their ideas and information. This firsthand information or knowledge sharing process will raise the awareness of locals and staff of RAP-SL too

Capacity - Building Component

RAP-SL is a membership organization with a scientific category. The scientific members are always ready to take up tasks for the organization and also help in project implementation including training, meeting/workshop facilitations, agricultural activities, radio programs and researches. The capacity need for RAP-SL is equipment for most of its activities. RAP-SL does not have enough cameras, GPSs, tongs, camping tents and rain gears for its staff. The need for vehicle is also invaluable for RAP-SL since it needs a good vehicle for its field trips and funding for its activities across the country. As part of this grant, more cameras will be bought for the field staff so that they can?t miss any of the project activities and also a vehicle and boat will be hired for the transportation of building materials, solar and Kiosks items and field trips while the office vehicle will be used in running most of the projects errands in Freetown and to the main wharf en-route to the project site in the Bonthe District. RAP-SL has wealth of capacity in biodiversity research, surveys, campaigns and monitoring. It also has wealth of knowledge in community development activities including those of agriculture and solar electricity. What RAP-SL lacks is sufficient funding to be able to undertake its herpetofauna survey across the country and also establish offices at regional levels. In order to strengthen these weaknesses, RAP-SL is always writing proposals for funding and raising funds through its membership drive and the use of its equipment by other NGOs and individuals

Promoting Public Awareness of Global Environment

Result of the project will include solar electricity in the Mania primary school and two static solar charging station, five mobile solar charging station, solar lamps for all pupils per households, two computers, two teachers trained in computer uses and more than 50% of pupils able to start-up a desktop computer and identify some key peripherals including keyboard, mouse, printers, speakers, CDs, DVD etc. The results of the project will be public in a newsletter that will be distributed within RAP-SL areas of operation in the Bonthe District. The methodology of setting up solar energy in coastal communities will also be made into a booklet that available to interested CSOs upon request.

Emphasis on Sustainable Livelihoods

The use of the solar energy (solar lamps) will contribute to the socioeconomic growth of the parents since they will be saving moneys used to buy batteries for their battery-powered lamps for their kids at home while the solar charging centers for Mania and Bohol will be raising funds from the agreed charging fees that will be used towards the development of their communities. Job opportunity will be created for at least five disabled/disadvantaged youths that will be in charge of the mobile kiosks solar charging facilities. For the disabled, the solar charging kiosks will serve as alternative livelihoods to whatever activities they have been involved in and it will greatly help to improve upon their living conditions since they will be raising money from the charging fees paid by locals for charging the phones and/or DVDs.

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Indicators

Biophysical

Tonnes of CO2 decreased or avoided by energy efficient and renewable energy technologies or applying environmentally sustainable transport practices introduced by SGP Project 2000

Livehood

Number of individuals (gender diaggregated) who have benefited* from SGP project 1210

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